Basic Regular Expressions - regex - egrep

re.search('parameters_here') # this will search through lines until first instance of parameter re.findall('parameters_here') # this will continue after first instance in a line ^ Matches the beginning of a line $ Matches the end of a line . Matches any character \s Matches whitespace \S Matches non-whitespace * Repeats a character 0 or more times *? Repeats a character 0 or more times (non-greedy) + Repeats a character 1 or more times +? Repeats a character 1 or more times (non-greedy) [aeiou] Matches a single character in the listed set [^XYZ] Matches a sigle character NOT in the listed set [a-z0-9] The set of characters can include a range ( Indicates where a string extraction starts ) Indicates where a string extractions stops /d = digit /d/d/d = '555' /d/d/d./d/d/d./d/d/d/d = 555-555-1212 /d{3} = '555' /d{3}[-.]?/d{3} = 555.555 or 555-555 ^X.*: = Line starts with 'X' followed by any character, many times, ending in colon ^X-\S+: = Line starts with 'X-' followed by any non-whitespace character, one or more times, then ending in a colon [0-9] = one digit from 0 to 9 [0-9]+ = one ore more digits [a-z] = one letter [a-z]+ = one or more letters [A-Z]+ = one or more uppercase letters ^F.+: = First character is an 'F', followed by one or more characters, ending in a colon ^F.+?: = This will return just the single word starting in 'F' and ending in ':' \S+@\S+ = At least one non-whitespace character in each direction from the '@' character ^From (\S+@\S+) = Same as above, but line starts wth 'From' string @([^ ]*) = find the '@' character, select the following more than one non-blank characters # ^From .*@([^ ]*) = Starting and the beginning of the line, looking for the string 'From', # followed by a space, then followed by any number of characters, to an '@' character, # Start extracting after the '@' character until you reach whitespace \$[0-9.]+ = '$' character followed by one or more digits or .